But they don't want anyone else being able to handle their property, even though they don't legally own it. And even if they did own the franchise, what happens when their kids get their hands on the franchise after their inevitable death? The solution? Torch the franchise and run. Write one last story that totally wrecks everything. They kill off everyone they possibly can. They make the lives of all of the characters a living hell before executing them. They make 100% sure that everyone is dead, and those that aren't have no way of returning to the status quo or main premise of the show.

Not to be confused with Franchise Killer, which describes a work in a franchise that's received so poorly there probably won't be any more installments anyway regardless of what damage is done to the status quo.

See also Kill 'em All, though this is done less for the story and more for the personal or legal satisfaction of the author. Related to Writer Revolt. When this happens in a physical sense, you get Trash the Set.

Examples:

One reason for Yoshiyuki Tomino's Kill 'em All tendencies was a desire to avoid making sequels. It didn't stop one of his shows from becoming one of the biggest franchises in all of anime.

His most infamous case of this happening was with Mobile Suit Victory Gundam. Tomino was struggling with a severe Creator Breakdown at the time and as result he wrote Victory to deliberately be as depressing and unpleasant in a bid to try to kill off Gundam for good. Didn't stop them from making more. In a way he almost succeeded, as it was over twenty years before anyone wrote story continuations explicitly set in the Universal Century beyond Victory Gundam (Crossbone Gundam: Dust (2016) takes place a few years later, while Gundam Reconguista In G (2015) takes place an unspecified number of centuries later).

Due to his reputation, Tomino's novelization of Mobile Suit Gundam is often mistaken for this; it ends with The Hero getting killed during the Final Battle and most of the White Base crew retiring from the military. However, in interviews Tomino has said that he gave the novels a definitive conclusion because he thought that was the end of it; he didn't anticipate Gundam becoming so popular and successful, and would have written the ending differently otherwise.

This all is largely exactly due to the situation mentioned in the trope description: Tomino desn't own the rights to the UC, but was usually given the free reigns over the creative side of the production. This, however, looks to change recenty, as Bandai, which does own the rights, seems to push forth the alternative canon based on the manga written by his former collaborator, and several light novels which, for now, appear to contradict a lot of things written by Tomino.

Master of Martial Hearts ended its last episode with a huge Take That! towards its viewers, anime in general, and especially panty fighter series. Any character who wasn't killed was so tarnished that they'd be unlikely to receive any audience sympathy again. It wasn't exactly the highest-quality production in the first place, but still.

Mahou Sensei Negima! received an extremely abrupt Distant Finale ending that had many fans puzzled as to the remaining unresolved plot threads. A short time later it surfaced that Ken Akamatsu had decided to end the series as a protest against his publisher Kodansha for their attempts to take away all the rights to the work, including the copyright itself and their intention to sue any and all doujinshi artists using the Negima characters and/or setting. Akamatsu, who himself began his career as a doujin artist, didn't take kindly to this, promptly gave Kodansha the one finger salute and told them he would be ending their biggest Cash Cow Franchise immediately. Nobody is killed off, however, as the story goes out of its way to make any sort of continuation completely impossible. The Big Bad is dealt with off-screen somehow and the romance is left ambiguous apart from Ship Sinking for the four most popular pairings for the main character. Akamatsu returned to Kodansha once he worked it out with Kodansha that they would never, ever, try the stuff they had talked about before, such as dual-copyright ownership of the manga, suing doujin artists, etc., lest he decide to totally close up shop with them and go to one of their competitors. He later wrote UQ Holder! as at first a Stealth Sequel to Negima, with a few returning characters. It eventually picked up more and more of Negima's old cast and started honing in on the biggest unresolved plot thread from the previous story (dealing with the Big Bad), to the point where the manga is now officially subtitled UQ Holder: Mahou Sensei Negima 2.

An In-Universe case happens in Saki Biyori Chapter 25. The Shindouji mahjong club starts a round robin journal, which, due to Kirame and Hitomi's actions, ends up developing a "Mister Shindou" comic. Club President Mairu has difficulty continuing it, so she puts in an order banning comics, but in response, people come forward with signatures begging for the return of the comic. In response, Mairu's best friend Himeko considers killing off Mister Shindou, to which Mairu responds by saying "Making him die is kinda..." but has him come back to life and live with his family.

Comic Books

Grant Morrison ended his run on the comic book Doom Patrol by pretty much torching the place down. The leader turned out to be evil, some characters died, others were permanently exiled to another dimension. The writer who took over only had one or two characters to work with.

This is not without precedent, however: the first version of the Doom Patrol ended with all the main characters dying. The version that came before Morrison's version ended with some of the cast dying and one of them in a coma. Interestingly, Morrison's version (which was one of the most popular) ended with only two characters dead and the rest walking away into the sunset.

Interestingly, when his run on the much-higher-profile Justice League of America ended, he only wrote out the characters he'd introduced during his run, leaving the same core 'Big Seven' team he started with, and essentially handing the next writer a blank slate. And the only character who died was one Morrison himself had created, since the character's own comic was cancelled before it had a chance to end properly.

All signs are pointing to this being what he's going to do once he's done with his run on Batman Incorporated, what with Damian Wayne's death and possibly the end of Batman Inc. itself. At the same time, the last few pages of the series repeatedly and forcefully remind readers that members of the al Ghul family never stay dead.

When Nova and Guardians of the Galaxy were scheduled to be cancelled because of low sales, Dan Abnett and Andy Lanning decided to finish them out via a crossover called The Thanos Imperative. By the end of the mini-series, Phyla-Vell and Drax were both dead, while Star-Lord, Nova, and Thanos were trapped inside the Cancerverse. It would be several years before the Guardians were plucked from Comic-Book Limbo and relaunched under a new creative team.

In The '70s, Jim Starlin was writing an Adam Warlock series that got cancelled mid-storyline. He was allowed to close the book on the characters via a crossover that ran between through the yearly annuals for titles like The Avengers and Marvel Two-In-One, and by the end, Adam, Gamora, Pip the Troll and Thanos were all seemingly Killed Off for Real. They remained dead for over decade too, before Starlin himself brought them all back to life in the lead-up to The Infinity Gauntlet.

X-Men spin-off X-Statix creator Peter Milligan bloodily slaughtered all the surviving team members in the book's final issue. Not that this stopped him from revisiting some of them for a miniseries set in the afterlife, or other writers from bringing back Doop in future series.

Peter David left his original run as writer on The Incredible Hulk under unpleasant circumstances. So he killed off Betty Banner in a sudden, horrific, ironically tragic, yet not really logical way (she'd been married to Bruce for years. Why did she suddenly wake up covered with radiation burns one morning?), and then made his last issue an alternate future issue set many years in the future, tying off all the comic's loose ends and giving everyone a very sad but definitive ending. Paul Jenkins, the next major Hulk writer, and most of the fandom treated most of David's last issue as a What If? story (though Betty stayed dead for a few years).

John Byrne similarly did this to Iron Man, leaving the book with Tony Stark on death's door thanks to a techno-organic virus eating away at his central nervous system with any use of the titular armor significantly shortening his lifespan.

In 1990, after getting a deal with DC, Alan Grant killed off Johnny Alpha, the protagonist of Strontium Dog, to prevent any new writers from messing with him. A few years later, John Wagner started writing prequels, and recently brought Johnny Back from the Dead, to the disgust of the fanbase. The end of The Life And Death Of Johnny Alpha leaves it ambiguous as to whether he's dead again.

Alan Moore may or may not have wanted to prevent anyone else from using the characters from Watchmen, but its bleak ending and thorough Deconstruction of the superhero genre certainly had that effect all the same. This is the reason why the story uses expies of the Charlton Comics superheroes: Moore was initially hired to write a story using the Charlton characters themselves, but DC executives looked at his first draft and realized that if they published the story they'd never be able to use the characters again. They asked him to either change the story or change the superheroes, and he changed the superheroes. Watchmen remained a standalone miniseries for over 20 years—and when DC finally did decide to make more stories in that 'verse, they commissioned the new writers to create prequels instead of attempting to continue from where Watchmen ended, and even then it's proven hugely controversial. They finally decide to just weld Dr. Manhattan (and possibly other Watchmen characters) to the mainline DC during DC Rebirth, and handled by the heads of DC, ensuring that Watchmen as a franchise cannot be killed off.

Allan Heinberg did this to the Young Avengers in Avengers: The Children's Crusade #9 by killing off Stature and The Vision, as well as having Patriot retire and the rest of the team split up. Later writers have revived the team, but with new characters to replace the departed ones.

Played-Subver-... Something in Captain Carrot and His Amazing Zoo Crew!: fantasy writer Ezra Hound attempts to kill off his hero, Bow-Zar the Barkbarian, so he can write serious fiction. Bow-Zar, in turn, time travels to the present and attempts to kill off Ezra Hound.

One backup story in Marvel's Conan the Barbarian featured a Robert E. Howard stand-in trying to kill off "Starr the Slayer" (an obvious knockoff of Conan) but the eponymous character somehow came through the fourth wall and slew him before he could do so.

The sad story of DC character Mystek was this. Writer Christopher Priest created her as a new character with the hopes of getting her own mini-series. To test the waters, DC Comics asked Priest to put her into other titles, placing her in The Ray and later having her join Justice League Task Force. In the end, DC decided that a Mystek mini just wouldn't be worth it and Priest, stuck with a character that DC now owned and he didn't want anyone to use, promptly had her shot out of an airlock, literally.

Robert Crumb hated the Fritz the Cat movie. So much in fact, that he killed off the character so they couldn't make a sequel. It didn't work.

Matt Fraction ended his short-lived Marvel series The Order by having the whole team curb-stomped by Ezekiel Stane, which included the team leader having to Mercy Kill one of the members to stop her Superpower Meltdown from destroying LA. To add insult to injury, Stane only did it to piss off Tony Stark, and when he appeared as the villain in the first arc of Fraction's Invincible Iron Man none of the surviving Order members got to be involved in taking him down. There's a fan-theory that this was a metafictional Take That, Audience!, with Ezekiel representing Marvel fans who are only interested in forty-year-old characters and don't support series with new characters.

Kieron Gillen came out and said (mucho spoilers, by the way) this was the reason behind the ending of his run on Journey into Mystery. In the fullness of history, the probability of Kid!Loki being written back into villainy approaches one, so Gillen tied up all his outstanding plotlines and literally wrote Kid!Loki out of existence. Oh, and had Old!Loki take over his body.

He then, however, had Kid!Loki reappear in his Young Avengers run as a Spirit Advisor to Old!Loki, although it's not clear whether it's a genuine haunting or a delusion.

And then went on to retcon the original torching - it wasn't Old!Loki who took over Kid!Loki, but a copy Old!Loki had created to screw Kid!Loki over. He was haunted by guilt over killing Kid!Loki and subconsciously used his reality warping powers to manifest the Kid!Loki ghost. Once he owned up to what he'd done, the ghost disappeared.

After Ken Penders sued Archie Comics to fully regain use of the characters he created during his time as head writer of Archie Comics' Sonic the Hedgehog it became obvious later on down the line that both sides were shooting themselves in the foot with their legal missteps and, tired of it all, settled. In the span of a year, Archie ended up exiling nearly everything created by former writers since the series began, culminating into Sonic the Hedgehog/Mega Man: Worlds Collide unleashing a Cosmic Retcon on the Sonic comics partially for this reason.

2000 AD had an in universe example in a Future Shock titled "The Mainstream". The author of a series of books known as the Clench series gets sick of writing science fiction, so he writes a story where the main character gets into a near fatal accident and has several body partsreplaced with cybernetics and then goes on to be assimilated by the titular Clench, where his mind overrides their collective consciousness. His agent calls him out on it, but he doesn't care. Then, he gets attacked by his own creation and left in a coma. Maybe.

Attempted with 22 Jump Street, with its credits showing what would happen if they made increasingly ridiculous sequels set in ninja academies, retirement homes, space, and as a video game, among other things. However, a sequel was greenlit anyway and there are talks of a crossover with Men in Black.

Infocom's Enchanter trilogy, set in the same universe as the Zork trilogy, ended with all magic in the world being destroyed in Spellbreaker because it was the only way to stop the Big Bad from remaking the world in its own image. However, this did not prevent two more games set in that universe (Beyond Zork, which takes place concurrently with Spellbreaker, and Zork Zero, which is set many years before), from being published before Infocom's demise presumably prevented further official sequels for good. It also didn't prevent Activision from creating graphical Zork games set centuries afterward in which another age of magic occurred.

In Stationfall, the sequel to the popular Planetfall, Steve Meretzky had the Robot Buddy Floyd killed off because he didn't want to do a third game. After Infocom's demise, Activision was planning on doing a graphical sequel anyway (tentatively titled The Search For Floyd), but the project was soon cancelled. There were also two novels loosely based on the games and set after the events of the games, by Arthur Byron Cover, but these novels were generally poorly received.

Literature

L. Frank Baum was caught in a situation like this. He desperately wanted to stop writing stories about the Land of Oz, but his publisher and fans wouldn't let him. He had established that nothing dies in the land of Oz, so he couldn't kill anyone off. In the sixth book, he tried to use the Literary Agent Hypothesis to justify never writing a single thing about Oz again because an invasion caused Oz to become isolationist and totally cut off all contact with the outside world, thus promising to never ever write another story about Oz ever again. When his other books failed to sell as well, he had to begin writing stories about Oz again to pay his bills, backpedaling and explaining that they discovered the radio in Oz that Dorothy could use to broadcast Baum news about Oz.

The last Witch World novel had every single character from the series traveling all over the world to shut down all the Gates so that no one and nothing can come through from Outside again, ever. So far it has stuck.

One of the earliest examples is Sherlock Holmes' original death. Also backfired. Explanation: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was starting to get tired of Holmes and wanted to write historical novels, so he had Holmes die at Reichenbach Falls. He did try to ignore the backlash caused by the move, and did for a decade, before returning to Holmes after those historical novels failed to sell.

In-fiction example: In Stephen King's Misery, the author Paul Sheldon grows to hate his series of romance novels about Misery Chastain. In his latest book, he kills Misery so he can end the series and focus on more "serious" writing. Then he finds himself under the care of a demented fan (the Kathy Bates character in the movie) who's very unhappy with that ending. She forces Paul to write one more novel to undo that ending.

There was a post-apocalyptic pulp-novel series called The Last Ranger. In the final novel they blew up the Earth.

Done in-universe in the Hyperion Cantos: the poet Martin Silenus, finally realizing that his profitable series of books has become a brain-dead Cliché Storm, decides to just kill the thing off, completely and utterly, so that he can go and search for his "muse" and work on real poetry. (Though in fact his audience had such bad taste that the torching didn't work, but he decided to walk away and let his publishers do what they willed with it.)

This is why the title character regains his sanity and dies at the end of Don Quixote. After publishing what became Part One, Cervantes was dismayed to see other writers producing unauthorized Quixote stories of their own, so he wrote Part Two as he did to give the character a definite ending.

Agatha Christie killed off Hercule Poirot in Curtain to give the character a definite ending and prevent other writers from writing more books with him after her death. She actually wrote Curtain during World War II, worried about the possibility of being killed in the London Blitz, but as she wasn't, she continued writing for several decades, and Curtain was not published until a few months before her death in 1976.

And it hasn't stuck anyway, as a new Poirot novel is being released in 2014. However, it seems that this one takes place somewhere earlier in Poirot's timeline, so it doesn't appear to be a Retcon.

Larry Niven's Known Space nearly had one of its own. In 1968 Niven had decided there wasn't much left to say in that particular universe, and asked his friend Norman Spinrad what he should do with it. Spinrad suggested writing a story that basically destroys the entire thing (Niven never asked why, saying he and Spinrad think alike). This story, Down in Flames, was outlined but abandoned when Niven read about Dyson Spheres and was inspired to write Ringworld. Ringworld and Down in Flames use mutually opposing assumptions about canon (DiF assumes the Core Explosion was a hoax and a Tnuctipun conspiracy, Ringworld accepts the Core Explosion happened and that the Tnuctipun have been dead for a billion years as early stories said), making it impossible to use "Down in Flames" and keeping the 'verse alive.1977 version discussed the possibility of the explosion and tied it and Ringworld into the story. But by then Niven was even less inclined to end the series.

Mostly Harmless ended with every version of Earth in the Multiverse being destroyed, and almost all of the regular characters dying. Oddly enough, creator Douglas Adams did intend to make a new book in the series to undo the damage, as he'd written Mostly Harmless while severely depressed and was extremely unhappy about where he'd taken things, but died suddenly of a heart attack before he could write it. Eoin Colfer was contracted to write his own continuation.

The protagonist of The Witcher novel series gets killed with a pitchfork in the last book. Most of named characters are already dead, are dying or will be dead soon. And just to Salt the Earth, the whole world will also suffer a The Black Death grade epidemic (which is, in fact, the Black Death dragged from another world into Nilfgaard by Ciri). Then, the video game comes out with a continuation. The author is fairly inconsistent in his approach, though. In an interview from the Enhanced Edition of the game, Andrzej Sapkowski stated that he is fine with the games existing and views them as valid stories in the continuity... but during 2012 Polcon, Sapkowski did a U-turn and declared the new continuity non-canon. When he did write a book, he used Geralt, but wrote it as a prequel to the entire saga. Rather than bothering themselves over rejoicing, the fandom should accept that it's a Ghost in the Shell situation, with two separate continuities: One for the books only and one for the books and games.

And just to be thorough, the authors even insisted that TSR remove Lord Soth from the Ravenloft setting, then proceeded to kill him off. Not only did they torch their own franchise, they didn't even leave its Crossover character un-singed.

Some suspect R.A. Salvatore is trying to do this with the Drizzt novels because A) he doesn't want a lesser author writing his best-known character and B) he may be running out of ideas.

There are numerous rumors that he attempted to leave the series in 1997, which led to the commissioning a new Drizzt novel called Shores of Dusk from another author. Salvatore came back to the series and the (apparently completed) Shores of Dusk never saw the light of day.

Before the release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, there was speculation as to who JK Rowling was going to kill off. Some predicted that she would kill off the main characters simply to stop other people taking them and continuing the story on their own. She didn't, though. Not all of them, anyway. Rowling occasionally implied she would, though Harry's death ends up coming with a loophole that lets him come back.

The final book in Animorphs ended the main conflict and thrust the team into a Bolivian Army Ending three years later, strongly hinting that every member of the team died but Cassie. Ironically, this final book was titled The Beginning. K.A. Applegate would later defend the ending as being a case of Reality Ensues, arguing that wars never have a quick and easy solution, but she's also been quite bitter about Scholastic owning the rights to her franchise. It might even be a bit of both.

Colin Dexter wrote the novel series Inspector Morse, which started in 1975, and ended in 1999 with the 13th and last novel, The Remorseful Day, which kills off Inspector Morse via heart attack.

In-universe example in Terry Pratchett's short story "Final Reward", where a fantasy author kills off his Barbarian Hero following an argument with his girlfriend. Hilarity Ensues when "sent to meet his maker" turns out to be literal.

When J. Michael Straczynski was asked what he would do if TNT tried to commission a sixth season of Babylon 5, he replied "Two words: Scorched earth."note As it is, the finale is set in a future where several of the main characters are dead and ends with the station blowing up and the show's lead Ascending to a Higher Plane of Existence.

The highly-anticipated finale of Seinfeld, called "The Finale," was notorious for ending the show by having the main cast being put on trial, convicted, and imprisoned for everything that happened on the show.

Of all shows, Little House on the Prairie ended with the entire town being dynamited, though the cast was spared. According to Michael Landon, the reason for blowing up the set was so that it couldn't be used by later shows, or commercials.

Jim Henson's Dinosaurs ended the world in the very last episode, so that revivals couldn't happen.

Doctor Who webcast "Death comes to Time" is an odd example of this, coming out when the original series of the show had been cancelled. It features the 7th Doctor, even though the 8th Doctor had already appeared (though how canonical the TV Movie was was disputed), and has the Doctor dying when he uses Time Lord powers that only appear in this story to kill a rogue Time Lord and save Ace, and claims that the age of the Time Lords is over. It is used by some fans to de-canonize the TV Movie and the New Series. However, the majority of fans don't hold this view, and it is widely believed to be non-canon, largely because of how unlike DW a lot of it feels, the audio drama "Zagreus" implying it takes place in an alternate reality.

The end of Six Feet Under doesn't preclude a revival so much as make it entirely redundant.

The acrimony between Amy Sherman-Palladino and Warner Bros. was so great that when she couldn't be signed on for a seventh season of Gilmore Girls she crippled the show so much in the sixth season finale that most of the fanbase refuses to accept that The CW-fied seventh season ever happened; new show head David Rosenthal was unable to do much of anything to fix what was broken, the new writing staff hurriedly thrown together seemed to not know the characters at all and mis-wrote them, and somehow a small town ensemble drama was changed around to be yet another generic teen drama with adults written like teens because without the creator around, nobody knew how to write them.

The A S-P strategy seems to be repeating with Janet Tamaro, who departed Rizzoli & Isles after the fourth season and left the season five writers with a ton to clean up, including a pregnancy scare for Jane, broken relationships and an out of left field Love Triangle between Maura and the Rizzoli brothers.

Actually, Janet Tamaro is staying on as a creative consultant (much like how Lauren Faust served a similar role on My Little Pony Friendship Is Magic). As such, some of the dangling plot threads are either being developed (Jane's pregnancy) or put on ice (Maura and Frankie deciding to stay friends).

In-Universe example: This is how Richard Castle of Castle ended his Derrick Storm novels so he could begin the new Nikki Heat series. He gets quite a bit of flack for it until the Heat books take off. He later brings Storm back to life anyway, so the point is rendered moot.

Three of the four series of Blackadder ended by killing off some or all of their main characters either as a real or parody version of this as they’d all be alive and reincarnated in a different time period the following series. The third one was the only one that didn't. Sure, the Prince Regent died, but it's okay. Blackadder took his place.

The Finder ended with Walter arrested, Isabel losing her badge and Willa has to run away to escape an arranged marriage with her cousin, and Leo is all alone.

One explanation for the "It was all an autistic child playing with a snow globe" ending in St. Elsewhere, as no other explanation makes sense (most of the plots were far beyond anything an isolated child would be able to think up all by himself).

One of the episodes of Friday the 13th: The Series revolved around a cursed comic book that could turn its owner into an invincible comic book character. However on learning that the creator of the character had tried to Torch the Franchise and Run but been stopped, they were able to find out the character's one weakness via his artwork.

Forever Knight ends with virtually all of the cast dying in the last three episodes, culminating with Nick accidentally killing his girlfriend and committing suicide. The last line of the series sums it up quite well: "Damn you, Nicholas."

Tre Kronor, a Swedish soap opera, ended with all but six characters killed in suicide bombing performed by a priest. Seriously

After five seasons the writers of The Brittas Empire were done with the series, and ended the final episode by killing the main character Gordon Brittas very definitely. Due to the series' popularity BBC continued it for another two seasons under different writers, with the script resorting to literal Divine Intervention to get Brittas back (which honestly wasn't that far-fetched considering the tone of the show). Then their final episode ended on possibly even more depressing note as the entire series turned out to have been All Just a Dream by Brittas as he was napping on the bus on the way to the job interview for the position where he started in the first episode.

Music

When The KLF grew disillusioned with the pop music industry, they decided to quit in a way that would turn off as many fans and burn as many bridges as possible. Their stadium house track "3 AM Eternal" had just been nominated for a Brit Award, so they trolled the audience at the ceremony by playing a brand-new, abrasive Hardcore Punk remix of the song. They ended the performance by announcing their retirement, effective immediately, with no prior warning whatsoever. Shortly afterward, they deleted their entire back catalogue, so no one could make any money from their music. Their parodic comeback show "Fuck the Millennium" played into this, albeit unintentionally. Critical reaction to the show was overall negative, which Bill Drummond was initially disappointed over. However, he cheered up when he realized that those negative reviews signaled that he and Jim Cauty had finally destroyed The KLF's last remaining bit of marketability and artistic credibility.

Newspaper Comics

John Darling was a comic strip spin-off from Funky Winkerbean by Tom Batiuk that ran about 12 years. Batiuk and his syndicate came into conflict over the rights so Batiuk killed off the title character and ended the strip, leaving the syndicate with a worthless property. Years later, Batiuk revisited the story in FW to solve the murder. Later still, introduced Darling's daughter, Jessica, as part of the FW cast.

Jim Davis ended his first comic strip, Gnorm Gnat, when he got bored with it by having Gnorm stomped by a giant foot.

Averted by Peanuts. Charles M. Schulz just retired, died a day later, and his final strip just said goodbye. No artist or writer in their right mind would ever dream of a Peanuts comic without Schulz. Regardless, since there was 50 years worth of strips, newspapers were content with re-runs.note That doesn't extend to films or TV specials, since Bill Melendez was mostly responsible for those. However, The Peanuts Movie still felt the need to have Schulz involved to lend it legitimacy.

This tactic, which he believed to be the only way to compete with Vince Jr on cable, ultimately lead to the downfall of Jim Crockett Promotions and the end of the National Wrestling Alliance as a major national force. Crockett actually shutdown more territories directly than Vince Jr, who was "smarter" in "letting" more of his acquisitions fail first.

Done with the MOTHER series. Itoi wanted the series to end with MOTHER 3, so he destroyed what little else remained of the entire world, and failed to answer the question of how the characters survived that - but they all personally insist to the player that they survived and they're happy. Somehow. Itoi said that the original script for the game was even darker, so the original ending was probably meant to Kill 'em All.

The final game in the Championship Manager series created by Sports Interactive was so bad that there is widespread belief that the company deliberately made it horrible, knowing they were going to split and create their new Football Manager series.

Dead Space 3: Awakened ends with the Brethren Moons fully awakening and beginning their campaign of genocide on the galaxy, and there is literally nothing Isaac, Carver or anyone can do to stop them, making further sequels all but impossible.

The Phantom Pain does this more subtly by ending at the beginning of the originalMetal Gear, thereby ending the prequel saga. With Kojima falling out with Konami, it certainly feels like Kojima tried this. This hasn't stopped Konami from trying to put out more games (such as a Metal Gear Solid 3pachinko game, no joke, and Metal Gear Survive), but given the backlash Konami's received over their treatment of Kojima, the fans might finish the torching for Kojima.

Part two of BioShock Infinite's DLC Burial at Sea kills off by far the most developed and full of potential character, Elizabeth, who was also one of the only remaining protagonists, inescapably ties the lore of both Rapture and Columbia together and does its level best to completely ignoreBioShock 2, uncoincidentally before all rights for the BioShock franchise are transferred to the people who made BioShock 2.

One reason for Drakengard'sMind Screw structure with seemingly disjointed alternate paths and heavy body count, was due to the creator not expecting his game series to get any sequels and therefore made the game as "conclusive" as he could make it. In a twist of irony, it was this trait that gave him and his franchise its following and allowed the series to continue.

The final chapter of Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony takes this up to eleven. After Tsumugi Shirogane is revealed to be the mastermind, said character also reveals that everything that has happened in the game is "Ultimate Real Fiction" based on a popular game and anime franchise called Danganronpa. In the Danganronpa V3 universe, the previous games and animes are popular works of fiction that were eventually adapted into a reality show where people are brainwashed into becoming Danganronpa characters and put into killing games resembling the original stories. Following this reveal, the protagonist swears to destroy Danganronpa, which culminates in a boss battle against the Danganronpa fanbase. The fight ends with the Danganronpa fanbase losing interest in Danganronpa and moving on. Following this, K1-B0 destroys the Ultimate Academy, seemingly killing everyone before self-destructing. Given that K1-B0 was the audience surrogate for the in-universe fanbase, this could be seen as a final goodbye to the Danganronpa franchise. However, in a post-credits scene, Shuichi, Maki and Himiko are revealed to have survived K1-B0's rampage and decide to move on to see if what they were told is true or not, hinting that Danganronpa may not be over after all. Needless to say, this ending has lead to a Broken Base in the fandom.

Webcomics

The final chapter of RPG World was basically an extended prose "fuck you" to the readers for their not enjoying his random-events humor over the much more interesting Character Development moments. Subverted, however, in that 9 years later, he's letting a fan do the ending, provided the original run stays on Keenspot.

For context, here is the DuckTales Issue 3 as covered by a blog and here is the same comic as covered by Cartoon Brew.

On May 6, 2017 (Free Comic Book Day), Pepe the Frog was killed off by its creator, Matt Furie, after it was co-opted by the alt-right and other white nationalist groups, as well as Furie's failed attempt to reclaim his character through his #SavePepe campaign. Subverted when Furie Kickstarted a comic about Pepe's resurrection, possibly as a response to the alt-right reacting to Furie's giving up on Pepe by acting as if they owned him, to the point of publishing a children's book about him (article 1, article 2).

Web Original

In "The Day the Music Died" by Sam Starbuck, a short story about everything possible going wrong with a Harry Potter-like fandom at once, this is one of the things that goes wrong. The author — who's writing the last novel of a series while on his deathbed — decides to finish with an apocalypse to prevent anyone from writing any sequels after his death.

A variant happens in one tandem writing assignment discussed on Snopes. Rebecca, disliking her partner Gary's attempt to derail the story she was writing into a science fiction action story, responded by killing off the male lead and attempting to write him into a corner by having Congress end the war with Skylon 4 and outlaw war and space travel. He then managed to get around this by having another alien faction attack, killing the female lead and causing the president to decide to veto the treaty. Rebecca then gave up in disgust.

Llamas with Hats: By the end of the series, every single living being on earth is dead and the main character, who was the sole survivor decides to commit suicide after finding the corpse of his best friend. In one blog entry, Jason Steele comments about how the series could have "gone forever" like Garfield or The Annoying Orange, but instead of that he preferred to end it.

A minor example was used in Justice League Unlimited. As part of the grand finale, they kill just about all of the new Legion of Doom, leaving 13 survivors from the entire Rogues gallery.

This is parodied in the Rocko's Modern Life episode "Wacky Deli": Ralph Bighead wants to get out of his contract with a TV network, who want him to create another hit show for them, so he hired Rocko, Filbert, and Heffer to come up with Wacky Deli, the worst possible show imaginable. Despite his earnest efforts to sabotage it, the show becomes a huge hit. When Ralph decides to actually his put time and effort into the episodes, Wacky Deli is immediately cancelled.

The Simpsons has an In-Universe case of this in one episode. In said episode, there's an issue of Radioactive Man where the titular superhero is pitted against three supervillains and ends up being killed by them, bringing an end to the series. Immediately after, however, the first issue of a reboot series of Radioactive Man is released.

The series finale of Aqua Teen Hunger Force ends with Frylock and Shake dead, Carl moving away, and Meatwad starting a family in a Distant Finale. Given how it was cancelled on the creators, and wasn't their decision, they probably aimed for this trope to make sure there wasn't a revival. This is immediately subverted when it was revealed that not only was that episode not the final one to be released (the next one aired online three days later), but also it wasn't even the last one chronologically (Shake watches the events on TV and claims that they happened last week). Then again, the series does run on Negative Continuity.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2012) (in production order) ends with the Mutant Apocalypse arc, which entailed the Turtles failing to stop a Mutagen bomb from exploding while they were still teenagers, and then, with the exception of Raphael and Donatello, spending the next 50 years separated, until Michelangelo is found and Leonardo's cured of his mutagen-induced insanity, and they find their way to their final destination. The showrunner, Ciro Nieli, admitted this was done so that nobody could come in and continue the series after he was done with it. While the next series, Rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is a new continuity, Nickelodeon advertised Mutant Apocalypse as an alternate universe rather than as a canon ending, putting this trope into somewhat shaky territory.

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